Tracing America’s Obsession With Conspiracy Theories Back to Its Founding

A college-educated liberal friend sitting at my kitchen table recently let me in on a secret: the fossil fuel industry is suppressing alien technology that could eliminate our need to burn oil and gas. The revelation is just one of any number of strange tales circulating on social media. From Jewish space lasers to microchips in vaccines, conspiracy theories seem to have gone full mainstream.

Robert Kennedy Jr.’s views are on the rise as the reputation of public health officials, long seen as earnest if rather dull civil servants, goes into free fall. Even meteorologists, those benign experts who suggest you carry a raincoat on that weekend outing, recently received death threats for “steering” hurricanes to damage their political enemies.

But before we forecast the imminent demise of reason and common sense, consider that it is always conspiracy season in America. The United States was, after all, founded on the curious belief that King George III and his wicked minions intended to enslave Americans. “You were mine to subdue,” croons the creepy crowned head in the musical Hamilton.

The trouble famously began in 1765, when Britain sought to tackle its budget deficit following the expensive French and Indian War that defended British America from its enemies. Placing a small tax on paper, stamps, and other products imported to the colonies seemed a simple way to get Americans to shoulder their share of the burden. Many colonists, however, viewed the Stamp Act as an attempt by shadowy forces to impose outright tyranny. South Carolina’s Henry Laurens railed against “a malicious villain acting behind the curtain” of the British government.

It was a claim that grew in popularity. Five years later, a speaker at a Boston town meeting declared that a “desperate plan of imperial despotism has been laid, and partly executed, for the extinction of all civil liberty.” In 1773, Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchison bemoaned the “artful and designing men” who had convinced a gullible public that the British government intended to enslave North American colonists.

By the eve of the conflict, many Americans believed the empire was run by a secret cabal that intended to put white Americans in bondage. Virginia planter George Washington warned that London powerbrokers intended to make colonists “tame and abject slaves, as the Blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.” Alexander Hamilton agreed that “a system of slavery” was being “fabricated against America.”

Thomas Jefferson likewise criticized the “deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.” His famous declaration insists that Great Britain, after committing “repeated injuries and usurpations,” intended to assert “an absolute tyranny” over the thirteen colonies. The nation’s founding document is nothing if not an attempt to convince the world of a dubious conspiracy theory. It was a theory that, as historian Bernard Bailyn writes, “lay at the heart of the Revolutionary movement.”

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There was, however, no “systematical plan.” Britain had a constitutional monarchy strictly limiting George III’s power, an elected Parliament that held the empire’s purse strings, and a legal tradition that provided a modicum of rights to citizens. The British press was the most lively and irreverent on the continent, and in the tight-knit world of London elites, secrets were hard to keep.

Revolutionary scholars—a notoriously disputatious bunch–are united in concluding that the mother country had no intention of reducing white Americans to the same status as the millions of Africans they held in bondage. “The conspiracy did not exist, but the colonists sincerely believed that it did,” notes conspiracy researcher Michael Butter. Even historian Jon Kukla, who empathizes with the colonists’ concerns and is skeptical of British claims, concludes that fears of “chattel slavery for white Americans was hyperbolic.”

Of course, indigenous or enslaved people living under the Union Jack had ample reason to revolt. The lands of the former were under threat from colonists, while the latter endured lifetime servitude. White colonists, by contrast, had many of the same rights and privileges of those living in Great Britain. When Americans squawked about the Stamp Act, for example, Parliament had it repealed. Compared to that of Spain and France, said another scholar, “the British empire looks mild mannered.”

Most colonists of the day considered themselves Whigs, members of the British political movement that prided itself on supporting domestic tranquility while championing individual rights (though these did not extend to Blacks, Indians, or Catholics.) Whigs could only justify a revolt, notes historian George H. Smith, if it was to prevent “an overall plan to establish despotism” rather than “merely isolated and unrelated events.” Yet Americans had elected legislative assemblies, a low tax rate, and a much smaller disparity in wealth than in Europe. Philadelphia in 1776 was hardly Paris in 1789 or St. Petersburg in 1917.

What, then, explains the widespread acceptance of the Great Conspiracy, a belief that motivated the founders to risk the wrath of the British Empire to seek independence?

Much like social media today, pamphlets and newspapers were then newly available on a mass scale and eagerly read. Those who believed in Albion’s perfidy—or exaggerated it for their own advantage–used these new tools adroitly. First among Hutchison’s “artful and designing men” was Massachusetts’ Samuel Adams. “We cannot make events,” he once said. “Our business is to wisely improve them.” Adams forged a compelling story that “improved” on the more chaotic reality of transatlantic politics, creating what we today might call “alternative facts.”

New England’s patriot leaders, such as John Hancock, were often merchants who profited from smuggling and resented British restrictions on their trade. The influx of British ships and troops after the Boston Tea Party in late 1773 stoked resentment among the region’s small farmers. It wasn’t too difficult to rouse these citizens to support the Glorious Cause.

The situation to the south, however, was very different. In Virginia, the oldest, largest, richest, and most populous colony, elite planters led the opposition to Britain. They chafed at the king’s refusal to grant them indigenous lands west of the Appalachians, a ban put in place to avoid a costly Indian war. They also were heavily in debt to Scottish traders and feared that continued slave imports would drive down the value of their human property. Being part of the British Empire was proving bad for business.

These concerns were of little interest to Virginia’s small farmers who made up the bulk of the white population. Most had never seen a redcoat, preferred home-made cider to tea, and cared little about land speculation. Yet their backing was essential in any fight against Britain. Then the royal governor, Lord Dunmore, impounded gunpowder stocks from the Magazine in the heart of the capital of Williamsburg in April 1775, to forestall an armed rebellion in his colony.

The country lawyer and gifted orator Patrick Henry seized this opportunity. Henry knew that an arcane dispute over tea and tariffs would not inspire the mass of white Virginians to take on the world’s most powerful empire. “These things will not affect them,” he explained to a friend that month. “They depend on principles too abstracted for their apprehension and feeling. But tell them of the robbery of the Magazine, and that the next step will be to disarm them,” he wrote. “You bring the subject home to their bosoms, and they will be ready to fly to arms to defend themselves.”

There was no British plan to disarm individual Virginians. But this did not stop Henry from giving impassioned speeches insisting that that the plunder of the Williamsburg arsenal was “nothing more than a part of the general system of subjugation.” His words struck home, galvanizing whites who feared they would be left defenseless against Indian attacks or the uprising of their own enslaved Africans. Enlistments in the patriot militia immediately skyrocketed.

Behind the clever Adams and charismatic Henry were dozens of newspaper editors sympathetic to the patriot cause and eager to spread anti-British propaganda. The owners of Virginia’s four newspapers, for example, were all staunch patriots, and they worked tirelessly to sway a public that remained largely on the fence.

Many New Yorkers, meanwhile, also were unenthusiastic about opposing Britain. In May 1775, an angry mob from Connecticut ransacked a newspaper deemed to be too sympathetic to loyalists; the lead type was melted down into bullets. In the year that followed, the Great Conspiracy went viral, the Declaration of Independence was adopted, and Britain’s arch enemy, Catholic France, intervened to provide critical financial and military support for the rebels. A nation was born.

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When the war was won, the American love affair with conspiracies did not dissipate. Even Washington, the country’s most adored and respected citizen, proved vulnerable to their power. In the conflict’s aftermath, the former general and former Continental Army officers had formed the Society of the Cincinnati, a charitable group named for a Roman officer who had retired to his farm. Membership in this elite group was to pass down from father to son.

The organization was immediately attacked as a shadow military government with aristocratic pretensions. John Adams called it the “deepest piece of cunning yet attempted,” while fellow Massachusetts politician Elbridge Gerry—who gave us the term “gerrymander”—railed against “this political wolf” dressed “in sheep’s clothing.” Put on the defensive, an agitated Washington was forced to modify the society’s bylaws to tamp down the controversy.

Few scholars today credit the concerns raised by Adams and Gerry, but their influence was sufficient to threaten plans to adopt the new Constitution in 1787. Washington, who presided over the Philadelphia convention, unhappily reported there were those “hardy enough to assert that the proposed general government was the wicked and traitorous fabrication of the Cincinnati.”

The new government eventually was approved, and the society’s threat never materialized. But in subsequent decades and centuries, others would take its place. A parade of Freemasons, Mormons, Jews, Abolitionists, Anarchists, Communists, and Muslims would later be seen as antithetical to the nation or its way of life. In the 1850s, the anti-Catholic Know Nothing party feared that the pope intended to use Irish immigrants to take over the country, and even stole the stone that Pope Pious IX had sent to incorporate into the Washington Monument.

“In America, it is always a paranoid time,” says conspiracy researcher Jesse Walker. Real dangers, of course, always exist; as the saying goes, just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get you. British redcoats attacked colonists, anarchists set off bombs, a right-wing nationalist blew up a federal building, and Muslim fundamentalists destroyed the Twin Towers. Yet, too often, popular conspiracy theories masked simple intolerance and ended in harsh persecution of innocent citizens cynically manipulated by political leaders.

Are we doomed to repeat this cycle? Researchers say that conspiracies proliferate when Americans struggle with growing inequality, increased immigration, and a proliferating distrust of elites. If they are correct, it is not hard to see why there is an upswing in contemporary conspiracies. Butter argues that we are, in fact, emerging from a lull, and “returning toward that position of importance that they occupied throughout most of American history.”

Today, Americans are coming full circle, with Washington bureaucrats standing in for the British ministers of 250 years ago. The view that the federal government is run by a “Deep State” is simply the latest version of the “malicious villain acting behind the curtain” popularized in colonial times. If we take history as our guide, the sole tonic for curing ourselves and our leaders of our destructive delusions is to create a more just and equitable society. That is just the sort of nation that our founders, despite the false conspiracy they embraced, had the foresight to envision.

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A Perfect Frenzy: A Royal Governor, His Black Allies, and the Crisis That Spurred the American Revolution by Andrew Lawler is available from Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic.